Browsing with Chrome now gets you longer battery life

The latest stable release of the popular Chrome for Windows browser from Google now has full GPU acceleration enabled for video decoding.

Dedicated graphics chips draw considerably less power than CPUs when watching videos, which means that your laptop will last that much longer.

In Google’s own tests, with GPU video acceleration enabled the battery lasted 25% longer when watching 1080p videos on YouTube.

Another update brought by this release is a quicker way to access permissions for any website you visit with Chrome. Instead of having to dig through a settings menu for the permissions of a particular website, simply clicking on the new padlock icon in the address bar will give you access to all the permissions available for the current website you’re visiting.

If you have Chrome already, then the update should roll out to you automatically. Otherwise, Chrome for Windows can be found here.